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PoliGAF 2014 |OT| Kay Hagan and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad News
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All for one and one for all!!!
MightyKAC
Member
Does anyone else think Obama is a closeted secular person? I know he invokes scripture a lot but he's also a politican... I don't know. It just seems like to Obama, religion is a very social thing, but not necessarily what represents him at a deep level... even if campaign Obama would tell you otherwise.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
That is somewhat the feeling I got from reading The Audacity of Hope. At the very least the fact that his mother raised him in a very secular, anthropological environment strongly influenced how he views religion, even if he is also a true believer. There's an explicit comment I remember in the vein of "while my mother was an atheist, I knew I wanted to join in the community of Christianity" or something
Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point post-Presidency Obama opens and hints at or outright reveals that he holds a lot of secular views.
If you read in between the lines of what he has written, it seems like he wanted to better understand what the vast majority of Americans believe and not just what his mother may have instilled in him -- and after understanding that, connect with people of faith to better analyze the best way to speak to the needs of those people and promote and enact policies that they wanted (particularly domestic/social level stuff). It makes sense especially when you see how he grew up; he was exposed to various aspects of culture/society by the time he got through college. More than most Americans ever would particularly by that point.
cartoon_soldier
Member
I think what you are trying to say is that he is not from real America. I agree with you.
lol...
WayneMorse
Banned
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/03/02/us/politics/senate-races-to-watch-in-2014.html?ref=us
NY Times jumping on the doom bandwagon. Didn't know Michigan and Colorado were that vulnerable.
NY Times jumping on the doom bandwagon. Didn't know Michigan and Colorado were that vulnerable.
They aren't.
PhoenixDark
Banned
Gary Peters will be fine in Michigan; I'd imagine they already have a Detroit rally planned with Obama. His opponent actually just flip flopped on Obamacare; last year she was on the 100% repeal wagon, now she says the Medicaid expansion is amazing.
RustyNails
Member
Fareed Zakaria is my man. One can learn so much from GPS.
I understand the Russian-Ukraine stuff now.
I understand the Russian-Ukraine stuff now.
TacticalFox88
Banned
Nope. I wouldn't be surprised AT ALL if decades later, when it was safer, Obama would come out as either non-religious or agnostic.
speculawyer
Member
Bill Maher likes to say it occasionally.
speculawyer
Member
Science FTW!
I'm not entirely sure what you actually mean by "closeted secular person". I think a vast majority of people in the world are both religious and secular. Religion doesn't manifest itself in all their beliefs, only in some philosophical ones.
Metaphoreus
This is semantics, and nothing more
"Secular" is definitely the wrong word to use here. Everyone engages in all manner of secular activities (e.g., getting an oil change or petting a dog), and hold beliefs that are not religious beliefs (e.g., "2 + 2 = 4," "I should probably change my oil now," or "Dogs are awesome"). I think the word he was looking for is "atheist."
Or "Muslim."
Just in case it's unclear, I'm kidding with the above spoilered remark.
rocketknight
Member
Is this when he's also going to come out as a closet progressive?
PhoenixDark
Banned
Obama strikes me as someone who embraced religion largely due to the community aspect, and while he doesn't seem deeply religious he certainly believes in god. Churches in Chicago gave him a place to stay, food to eat, etc. He seems religious in the way an American Catholic is religious: attend service every now and then, read some verses, but ultimately his religious experience is personal (not a big spectacle).
DoktorEvil
Banned
Does anyone recall when science and religion began this huge gap from being complementary studies?
I mean, weren't the same thinkers like Euclid that created forms of rudimentary math also well known scholars/philosophers as well?
In other words he's basically a weekend worshiper.
I can certainly live with that.
TacticalFox88
Banned
I still want to know which will come first:
Muslim or Atheist President
Muslim or Atheist President
WayneMorse
Banned
Atheist
Hoping Keith Ellison becomes the first Muslim Speaker of the House though!
Muslim easily. Because you can't raise money at Atheist churches.
As weird as it may sound, probably a muslin president. Atheists are literally about as popular as child molesters.
theprodigy
Member
WayneMorse
Banned
There are a lot of atheist millenials.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/03/...you-cant-point-to-god-to-excuse-your-bigotry/
Somebody help me out here. This is something I keep hearing from conservatives but I don't seem to get the distinction. In that clip above, Rich Lowry says that nobody's trying to discriminate with the Arizona bill and that it doesn't allow people to refuse service to gay people. Then, mere seconds later he says that if somebody (in this case a baker) wants to refuse to provide service to a gay person, because of their "conscientious objections", it's totally fine to do so.
How does that work? And I'm not even being snarky here. Cause I seriously don't understand the distinction.
Somebody help me out here. This is something I keep hearing from conservatives but I don't seem to get the distinction. In that clip above, Rich Lowry says that nobody's trying to discriminate with the Arizona bill and that it doesn't allow people to refuse service to gay people. Then, mere seconds later he says that if somebody (in this case a baker) wants to refuse to provide service to a gay person, because of their "conscientious objections", it's totally fine to do so.
How does that work? And I'm not even being snarky here. Cause I seriously don't understand the distinction.
The NY Times kept riding the Jhota has a chance bandwagon when every poll showed him down by 40
The NY Times political prognostication is pretty trash after Nate split
If I understand correctly, you can't refuse to serve them coffee but you can refuse to bake them a cake.
Rich Lowry is a fucking idiot, always have been; Van Jones was bringing the truth.
Avon Barksdale
Member
I didn't even know the Texas primary was this Tuesday...in Texas.
WWF joke.
smokeandmirrors
Banned
Enough to overcome the more populated and slightly more religious older generations?
Watching the video, all I can see that he is offering as a distinction is that it takes more effort, interaction, and/or participation to bake a cake or arrange flowers than to serve a coffee?
So, if you are religious and can't stomach gay people, you can and should probably just suck up the 30 seconds of interaction it takes to serve a coffee, but you are unnecessarily burdened when you have to spend more than 2 minutes discussing cake requirements?
Take that high disposable income money and run when you can religious bigots! Gays can't impose their agenda on you in a coffee shop as it takes at least 60 seconds of conversation before gay propaganda starts taking affect!
worldrunover
Member
The ironic part is gay people's money is just as green as everyone else's. So really we finally found the one thing more important than money: bigotry!
PhoenixDark
Banned
The wedding excuse opens quite a slippery slope. If you can reject to serve someone based on your religious views, how far does that go? Sure serving someone coffee has nothing to do with religion, I'll give Lowry that - however what about a local rec center basketball coach who requires a permission slip from parents to join the team, and refuses to accept one from a kid with gay parents? What about a hotel owner who refuses to allow a gay couple to spend the right? Bakers and florists aren't the only professions that deal with marriage.
Well, unless you are serving up coffee to gay people on a coffee date, and therefore helping facilitate their relationship? What if a gay couple proposes over coffee?
In other words, there is practically no end to the slippery slope.
WayneMorse
Banned
If Leo gets robbed of Best Actor tonight it's another sign of just how far #obamasamerica has decayed.
NYCmetsfan
Banned
He's religious. I don't know why atheists keep thinking he isn't. Its always been a part of his life, its in his books and every campaign, interview, etc.
Do you think only evangelicals are Christians?
There have been non-christian non-Abraham religion presidents before. Multiple.
It will be an agnostic. There's more of them. They won't be an atheists because they're annoying and pretentious most of the time.
Let's say you believe tha Obama is closet agnostic or atheist. If he ever "came out" it would be akin to his "evolution" on same sex marraige. He will say his views changed not "lol I straight up concealed this from you when it was electorally expedient, now what bitches?"
Angry Fork
Member
I always got the impression he was not a believer based on his upbringing. It's one of the few positives about him. Keeping it secret (if true) is a negative though obviously.
TacticalFox88
Banned
Not like it would matter. Most who hate him are dead set in their ways
Yeah, like I said, it makes no sense to me.
I think they would try and justify this by saying they're trying to give more power to the job creators by allowing them to turn away anyone they disapproved of.
Also too:
Regarding the Obama closet atheist/agnostic thing, I think Penn Gillete got it right:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJGxVeQw3SE
NYCmetsfan
Banned
Where is the evidence for Obama not being a believer? Its like you guys think a good guy can't be religious and believe in God
Aaron Strife
Banned
Well... I mean... Yeah!
I find the belief with a lack of evidence the best part of the theory. Adds that last bit of irony!
NYCmetsfan
Banned
Hahaha
Mostly it's that he wasn't raised Christian. Most people in his situation would not be Christians. By his own account, he didn't become a Christian until adulthood, by which time being known as a Christian would likely have been immediately useful to him in his work as a community organizer.
So in the absence of costly signals from him that he is actually Christian (these are basically impossible for him to provide at this point), there's at least a significant chance that he's not a believer in the usual sense (that he can't sincerely affirm the Nicene Creed, say).
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
"Evidence" for me mostly comes from Audacity of Hope where he discusses his faith and very much puts it in terms of how he was raised by an atheist mother but joined "the community of Christianity" without really commenting on the whole "believing in the Bible" part. Do I think he doesn't believe in the Bible? No. Do I think the odds are higher then say, an actively devout person who was raised in the Bible Belt? Yeah
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